The Transformative Logic of Community Empowerment

ETHOS Issue 28, Apr 2025

In Singapore, the dominant paradigm of how to enact social change has been characterised by interventions which are state or philanthropy-funded, centrally managed, professionally administered, carried out at scale and decided through competitive bidding so that the best agencies with the strongest interventions deliver the most impact. Each aspect of this paradigm is based on well internalised rationales that have become truisms:

• The state is prepared to provide for social needs, but charitable contributions can help to plug gaps and reduce the burden on the public purse.
• Volunteers are appreciated for reasons beyond defraying the cost of running programmes, but certain social services are best delivered by professionals who have deep expertise informed by research and acquired through extensive training.
• Where viable, a social business model helps reduce reliance on grants.
• While collaboration is ideal among charities, allowing some forms of competition between providers can help to improve quality and efficiency. Sometimes consolidating smaller players into fewer larger organisations eases administration.
• To improve sector-wide outcomes, services should be centrally administered to reduce duplication, coordinated across multiple agencies for a coherent overarching strategy, and scaled so there is greater impact.

This approach might be termed a 'service provision' paradigm. It combines the logic of administration and the logic of the market.¹ Such a paradigm tends to regard citizens as 'clients' presenting problems for experts to resolve. As the government has expanded social welfare provision and professionalised its manpower, the paradigm has become entrenched in our common understanding of how to approach social issues. This paradigm is dominant for good reason—it predominantly works.

The Logic and Limits of Service Provision

The problem with paradigms, however, is that there are always limitations. People use cognitive shortcuts, defer to established protocols, and apply institutionalised scripts based on unquestioned assumptions. While this facilitates quick consensus on appropriate action, they also limit viable alternatives from being considered seriously.

To illustrate what might be missing, take the example of a social issue close to the hearts of many: youth learning. If a family is concerned about their children not doing well academically, a popular solution today is to turn to private tuition. For low-income families that cannot afford tuition, there is a voluntary sector answer: our community self-help groups, along with every other social service agency (SSA) working with young people, will offer volunteer-run or subsidised tuition. From the service provision point of view, this solution is attractive because it is a clearly defined intervention with highly measurable outcomes that can be scaled if resources are put in place. Indeed, the solution can be effective—youths who just need some extra help outside the classroom will benefit. But for others, tuition fails to improve grades because their problems are more wicked—perhaps an incarcerated parent, drug abuse, difficult relationships with teachers, or all the above. When more challenges are discovered, more services are stacked on to address them.

Singapore, being well-resourced, can continue to redouble efforts and offer ever more service provision for a time. Today's youth receive counselling, mentoring, group work, financial assistance, and other interventions so comprehensive the approach is described as 'wraparound' care, coordinated as a seamless experience across multiple agencies. The operating logic seems to be: "If only there were more services, and if only we could improve the coordination of these services and enhance their quality, we should be able to solve these problems." However, to meet rising aspirations for ever more comprehensive administrative oversight, our social service system has grown bigger and more complicated.²

Researchers have pointed out that professional services can become a kind of 'disabling help'.³ It has been argued that experts can crowd out the ability of communities to self-organise and build capacity and capabilities to solve their own problems. Those who advocate for an 'asset-based community development' approach suggest that disadvantaged communities have an abundance of underutilised strengths and untapped skills if we know how to find and unlock them.

An unintended consequence of a service provision approach is that SSAs begin to primarily relate to one another as competitors. They focus on cultivating 'vertical' ties with funders and government agencies—because that is how they secure resources—while neglecting their 'horizontal' ties with their peers. Research points to turf issues being commonplace among SSAs even though they recognise the value of, and even desire meaningful collaboration with peer organisations.⁴ Anecdotally, policymakers can also find it challenging to encourage SSAs to take on meaningful work if there is no funding to compel them to do so.

Alternative Paradigms: What Might They Offer?

Even if the service provision paradigm has limitations, it might continue to be employed—because it is difficult to step outside what has become 'common sense'. There may even be attempts to solve problems created by service provision with even more services. For example, social workers are given individual-level tools (e.g. casework and counselling) to solve structural problems (e.g. poverty). This mismatch can escalate to the point where they burn out. Then we create services to help these service providers. Tellingly, there are now stress management courses that equip social workers with self-care techniques so that they can cope.

Alternative paradigms allow us to consider entirely different kinds of solutions. I present three approaches here.

1. Community Building and Collective Empowerment

The underlying logic of community building can be expressed thus: "How do we unlock the unrecognised strengths, hidden potential and untapped capacities of communities—so they can collectively figure out meaningful solutions that are respectful of their culture, uniquely suited to their circumstances, and offer a chance to overcome structural disadvantages?"

A simpler form of this approach is already in mainstream use, which is the call to empower citizens, communities and clients to participate meaningfully in the decisions that affect their lives.

• In experimenting with alternatives to private tuition, IPS Policy Lab has been partnering with SINDA and exploring with other Student Care Centres to determine whether youths can teach and learn from one another through self-directed, collaborative learning groups.⁵ Instead of subject tutors, we are considering learning facilitators who will provide guidance on where and how to access resources and focus on learning strategies—e.g. 'learning how to learn'.
• Beyond Social Services helped a mother who suffered from schizophrenia and was not able to care for or send her children to school. Applying an 'asset-based community development' lens, they engaged the help of her neighbours, whose children went to the same school, both to chaperone the affected children, and to check in on the affected mother.⁶
• Yishun Health has built 'caring communities', called Wellness Kampungs, in which community connectors help seniors come together to deliberate on and engage collectively in health and caring activities for one another, allowing the flourishing of diverse local responses, instead of imposing standardised programmes.⁷

When community building logic is applied to firms, it leads to different solutions for social mobility and economic inclusion, such as worker-owned cooperatives and community-owned enterprises—where instead of shareholder-led firms designed for profit-making, the economic activity is subsidiary to and in service of community objectives. Worker cooperatives are "values-driven businesses that put worker and community benefit at the core of their purpose" instead of profit at the expense of people.⁹ Community-owned businesses engage in commercial activities, but this is always anchored in a cause or community.

Another example of the community empowerment logic is Participatory Budgeting. This novel approach to citizen participation originated in Porto Allegre, Brazil in 1989.¹⁰ In 2025, Policy Lab will pilot a Participatory Budgeting project with a Town Council, empowering residents to submit ideas, deliberate and vote for the amenities they want in their neighbourhood.¹¹

Policy Lab also hopes to kickstart a form of Citizens' Assembly to see if Singaporeans can arrive at solutions to issues that divide them. The process involves pre-polling to help identify diverse opinion segments, deliberately forming citizens' panels that include people who disagree with one another, and then tasking them to arrive at a synthesised position. Another round of public polling is then conducted on these suggestions to see if they can achieve broad consensus.¹²

2. Mutual Aid and Peer-to-Peer Action

While community building might require formal organisations and even their own class of professionals (e.g. community workers), people can engage in self-help and mutual aid without them.

The logic operates this way: "How can regular people help one another without the need for permission, professionals or philanthropy?"

Coming back to our youth learning example: if our culture of mutual aid were strong, instead of professional services leading the way, parents might themselves form learning circles and mobilise their neighbours' children to participate. While less common today, such demonstrations of 'kampung spirit' still exist in Singapore.¹³

What might a peer-to-peer approach be to some of our most pressing and intractable problems? Are we able to create communities that care for one another? The 'Community Circles' project¹⁴ is a test of this: It mobilises a small group to provide informal support to meet ad hoc needs or longer-term aspirations. No official permission, approval or grant funding is required to do this. All that is needed is a small group of friends or neighbours as a unit of transformation. As such local actions and small groups can proliferate, the problem is addressed via a social movement instead of a programme.

When community-led initiatives are new, central administration and coordination can provide the sustained focus required to get it off the ground. A programme might be funded to kickstart, catalyse and coordinate diverse efforts. However, if the concept is to become peer-led mutual aid, then a programme should also have an intentional exit-to-community strategy so that groups can eventually self-manage these efforts.

The mechanism of social change would be decentralisation and distributed autonomy, to allow communities to re-use and remix what has been learnt elsewhere. This might be done, for instance, by documenting and sharing best practices for how to form, maintain and spread circles so that they can proliferate through a viral structure of social change rather than the 'scaling-up' of a programme.

While a centralised programme can be effective, the more beautiful story would be if regular Singaporeans come together in small groups to offer direct support to their fellows in need. Instead of a small professional class of 'changemakers' who heroically intervene to save the day, it would be more meaningful and sustainable to have the mass participation of everyday active citizens who care and contribute.

3. Contributing to the Commons

Implied in the first two logics is a core question that suggests the third paradigm: "How can we create, enlarge and safeguard common shared assets in a way that everyone can contribute jointly to and benefit collectively from?"

An example of this is the Open Education Resource Movement,¹⁵ founded on the conviction that learning resources should be open and free for all to use instead of enclosed within educational institutions. This 'commoning' approach involves pooling and sharing what might otherwise be proprietary or inaccessible assets, based on collective decisions on how to manage this shared resource together.

Non-profit organisations running programmes might well engage in community building and not commoning. Charities face pressure from funders and stakeholders to monetise their knowhow as proprietary knowledge so that they can receive grants for further runs of their programmes, or charge licensing or consultancy fees to others who want to learn from them. Indeed, Policy Lab had originally budgeted for training and consultancy fees for the UK organisation running 'Community Circles',¹⁶ assuming we would have to pay them to teach us. When we looked more carefully at their website, we found comprehensive 'do-it-yourself' kits and modular training videos enabling us to equip ourselves to run Community Circles. Making everything publicly available at no cost is their business model—and one considered foolish in a service provision paradigm.

But a poor business model may be a great social one. Enlarging the knowledge commons reduces the need for formal provisions from the state or markets. Communities can be better resourced because enabling assets are shared, and they can be more resilient, being more capable of self-organising and with fellow practitioners for support. An example of this principle at work is the open source movement that has helped accelerate software development and the IT revolution.¹⁸

How Do We Get There?

These different institutional paradigms or structural logics are not necessarily superior to any other, as each has their own limitations. Mutual aid or peer-to-peer efforts may be messy, duplicative and lack coordination. Communities may also lack deep technical expertise that professionals can bring in a more clinical context. Collective efforts and community decisions may also take a long time to realise, especially if there is a commitment to include marginalised groups. However, they offer alternative approaches well worth considering, particularly where service provision has reached the limits of efficacy.

When might one approach be considered over another? Where the citizenry is highly educated and capable of contributing meaningfully, it seems sensible to promote citizen empowerment, community building, and to distribute decision-making and agency.

We can experiment with diverse forms of citizen participation—so that enough low stakes deliberations at small-scale or local levels help prepare citizens when stakes are higher. Participatory Budgeting in our towns, if commonplace and routine, prepares residents with parochial interests to step up to the role of citizens making decisions of national significance. Perhaps with enough practice, the Ministry of Finance could eventually trust citizens to deliberate on a portion of the national budget through participatory budgeting.

Observers have often characterised society as a three-legged stool, for which the three pillars—the public and private sectors, and a third people (or civic) sector—need to be equally balanced.¹⁹ If 'nationalisation' means the transfer of industry or commerce from private to state ownership and control, and 'privatisation' is the process in the opposite direction, then we may need a third term—'communitisation'—to describe the transfer of private or public control to a local or user community for self-management.^20,21

What we may need is a 'third sector' development strategy that intentionally focuses on meaningful community building, mutual aid and contributing to the commons. Indeed, Singapore's National Council of Social Service already acts as a membership body for non-profit social service providers, but there is no equivalent National Council of Voluntary Organisations to act as an associational body for charitable organisations across the larger third sector—arts, sports, health, education, social services and community.²² Issue-based networks and place-based communities could be formed to encourage voluntary organisations to connect with their peers. The goal would be to encourage the growth of a high solidarity third sector articulating and enacting the logics of communitisation and commoning.

Indeed, when communitisation is strong, useful alternatives start to become more evident. The community and non-profit sector has been regarded as a 'cost centre' of Singapore Incorporated—markets make money and the state redistributes it to the third sector to be spent. However, the community can itself be a site of serious economic activity. Local communities could well operate enterprises dealing with large amounts of money: in Germany, one such trust operates a wind farm in which the proceeds go to meet local needs.²³

If we are serious about addressing structural inequalities, we need to focus on building community (not individual) wealth. It is worth noting, however, that when such a venture is completed, the enterprise does not go around the country to scale up its operations. Instead, it looks to its local community to see what else it needs—a library perhaps, or youth centre, or some kind of social service. When economic activity is subservient to local community needs, it grows to an appropriate, sustainable size—never so large that it starts to exploit people or the planet.